


Between Here and There

by andacus



Category: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Clint Does What He Wants, Explicit Language, F/M, I Don't Even Know, Romance, Sexual Content, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 19:13:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andacus/pseuds/andacus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or The One Where Clint May Have Possibly Already Known Natasha.  You Know, Technically.  </p><p>Clint's whole life is really just one circus act after another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Between Here and There

He left the circus on a Tuesday. It was raining and he was bleeding, the shape of Cash’s fist bruising on his jaw, the echo of Barney’s insults bouncing around in his head. He was eighteen, as of three days before, but he felt lifetimes older than that. 

Nina caught up to him about a mile up the highway, the old pickup sputtering as she pulled onto the muddy shoulder. He passed her by, clutching his bag tighter to him, refusing to look her way.

“Clint,” she yelled and he heard the door slam, heard her feet slosh in the sloppy puddles. “Stop. Come on, stop.”

“What?” He turned to look at her, annoyed that she’d followed, annoyed that he kind of wanted her to.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere else.”

She tilted her head to the side, one eyebrow raised. “To do what, exactly? Is there some big need for archers somewhere that I’m unaware of?”

“Is there a reason you’re here?”

She paused for a moment and sighed. “Carson’s dead.”

Whatever he had been expecting, that was not it. 

“How? When?” Was all he could think to say, his mind calling back to the way the ringmaster had been coughing lately, to the way he’d been so tired and losing weight. He probably shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

“Trickshot found him about an hour ago. He was in his trailer. In his bed.”

They stared at each other for a long time, or at least it seemed like a long time, before she smiled sadly and held up a finger, indicating that he should wait. She spun on her heel, acrobatic grace clear in the way she moved, and returned to the truck. When she came back, it was with a large duffel and he couldn’t help but smile.

“Thought you’d want this.” She handed him the bag and he nearly changed his mind, nearly decided to stay in that traveling shit storm just to be with her. He could wake up every morning and run his fingers through her blond curls and kiss her throat, her thighs, her face. He could take her dancing and drinking and it would never get old.

He dropped the bag and kissed her then, dragging her against him, sighing when she wrapped herself around him. But it was over as soon as it had started and she pulled away a moment later.

“Go on, then. Go be whatever you’re going to be.”

***

Coulson was sitting at his desk, his face as neutral as ever, staring at him. It would have been disconcerting if it wasn’t the exact same thing he did after every mission. It was a trap, Clint knew, and he was never going to fall into it. 

They’d been working together for six months, had four successful missions under their belts in half that time and Clint was feeling a little cocky. Well, a little more so than usual.

“Barton.”

“Coulson.”

Coulson’s eye almost twitched, which Clint was willing to take as a sign he was wearing the other man down.

“You seem to have omitted a detail from your report.”

Clint scrunched his brow in mock confusion. “I what, now?”

“Barton,” Coulson said, his tone short.

“Coulson,” Clint said back, copying his tone.

“There is no mention in this report – this official report – of being reprimanded for disobeying an order to stand down.”

Clint shrugged. “I don’t recall being told to stand down, so…”

“You were told.”

“If you say so.”

“Do I need to explain to you again what the definition of thorough is?”

“I dunno,” Clint replied, playing dumb. “Do I need to explain how disobeying that order saved the mission again?”

This time, Coulson’s eye did twitch and Clint grinned. “You know, for someone who looks like a drives a Prius and works in a cubicle, you’re very handy in a firefight.”

“I am not, as you might have thought, the boss for no reason, Agent Barton. Now, fix this report and get out of my office.”

Clint took the proffered sheet of paper, saluted and left the office, grin still in place.

He really liked that guy.

***

Three weeks later, he was tucked into a closet, his bow bent, a painful gash bleeding all over his pants, and Coulson’s voice in his ear.

“When I say go, leave the closet, go straight down the hall and into the last room on the left. There’s a window to the west. Go through it and straight across the courtyard to the garden gate. Extraction team will be due west from that gate, approximately two clicks. “

He didn’t have time to do anything but mentally run through the directions before Coulson was saying, “Now. Go now.” And he was slipping silently into the hall and out of the house. 

He climbed through the specified window, mindful of his injured leg and cursed. “You didn’t mention I’d have to jump,” Clint grumbled into his comm.

“Man up, Barton.”

“Oh, you sorry…fuck, fuck that stupid, god damn, son of bitch…” He took a second, only one short second, to lie on the lawn, adjusting to the sharp jolt of pain that ran up his leg on impact from the two-story jump, but then he was on his feet, hobbling toward the gate.

He made it to the extraction point without incident and was more than happy to let the medics poke and prod him all the way back to the rendezvous point. 

Coulson was waiting at the helicopter, scowl firmly in place, as he limped up several hours later. “What the hell happened?” 

Clint glared at him. “There was a damn sleepover. Do you know how hard it is to kill someone when he’s surrounded by women who are paid to constantly touch him? Not to mention how mentally scarring?”

“This isn’t going to result in time off for PTSD, is it? Because, I need you on a flight to Cairo as soon as that leg heals up.”

“Fuck.”

***

On his two year anniversary with S.H.I.E.L.D, Clint was in Miami, boarding a ship that was supposed to be taking him to something called a helicarrier, which was only half built and Clint was pretty sure it was going to sink before it flew, when two men emerged from the water alongside the still docked boat and climbed aboard. They were armed to the teeth, yelling in what he was pretty sure was Spanish, and waving their guns around like they thought they knew how to use them.

He sighed because of course this shit happened to him.

Garcia, one of the newer agents rolled his eyes and Clint chuckled. It was over before it even started and Clint almost felt bad for them. Garcia was securing their ties, being intentionally rough when one of the men, still wearing his black ski mask (And how did they even swim in those?) cursed in English.

Armed with his bow and a smile, Clint tugged the man’s mask off his head. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen, skinny and snarling like he had any kind of right to be mad. His partner, once he’d been unmasked, was maybe thirty, but he had a hardened look about him, the kind of look Clint remembered seeing on Trickshot and in the mirror.

“Fuck,” Clint muttered under his breath, because he was many things - marksman, assassin, occasional spy - but he was also a goddamn sucker. “You two might just be the luckiest sons of bitches in the world.”

He and Garcia marched them onto the helicarrier deck and straight to the brig, but then Clint made a beeline for Coulson.

“You want to what?” Coulson had asked, once Clint had found him.

“Look, I know, I know.” Clind dropped into the chair facing Coulson’s desk, tired. “It’s just that they’re pathetically bad. I mean, like, so bad they’re dividing by zero. I think they just need someone to say, ‘Here. Don’t be dipshit. Stop doing illegal shit.’”

“S.H.I.E.L.D is not Social Services, Agent.”

“But we can at least give them the aptitude tests and a chance. You never know, maybe the kid’s got a killer head for dealing with perpetually angry one-eyed... yeah, okay, I’ll stop there.”

Coulson regarded him for a moment and without so much as twitching an eyebrow said, “It’s their choice. They can take the tests and if anything looks promising, they get one shot at academy like anyone else. _If_ , Barton. _If_.”

Turned out, the kid was some kind of strategic genius and more than eager to not go to prison. The other guy, not so much. But Clint patted himself on the back anyway, because he was probably a sucker for lost causes.

***

Living on a flying (He had to pay Hill twenty bucks.) aircraft carrier was awesome. 

Garcia was assigned the bunk next door to his and they acted like twelve year olds on Christmas at the idea of having their own rooms, even if those rooms were about the size of a shoebox.

They initiated poker night on Mondays and Coulson pretended not to notice. 

Clint started a thing with a small, curvy brunette named Yvonne, who worked in engineering. She was pretty and unexpectedly foul-mouthed and he liked her, but her job ended three months into whatever it was they were doing and neither one cared enough to keep it going once she left.

He ordered an X-Box and a handful of games and Wednesdays became game night, which had absolutely nothing at all to do with Wednesdays being Fury’s off base day.

Coulson told them get rid of it and then pretended he cared that Clint ignored him.

***

It was a Wednesday and he was just about to wreak some serious havoc on a hoard of zombies when Hammond showed up, leaned behind the TV and yanked the plug out of the wall.

“What the fuck?” About nine people said in unison.

“Barton, Fury wants you in his office asap.”

Clint toyed with the idea of taking his time just to be contrary, because, dude, game night. But Fury was a scary-ass man and even Clint, who somehow managed to get away with making his own rules half the time, wasn’t that dumb.

The office was unexpectedly full when he showed up. Fury was standing near the window, his arms behind his back, looking weirdly like a one-eyed Morpheus. Clint made a mental note not to comment on the new black coat the director had taken to wearing. Coulson and someone Clint vaguely recognized as a colonel, though he would be damned if he could remember the man’s name, were leaning over the desk, peering at a forest worth of papers and photographs.

“Barton,” Fury said in greeting. 

“Sir.”

“We have a lead and we need to move on it,” Fury said, his one eye fixed on Clint. “It’s a very sensitive situation and in order to have you on this, we are upgrading your clearance level to four.”

“Thank you, Sir,” Clint said, silently surprised and more than a little intrigued. 

Coulson straightened and handed Clint a photograph. “This is the first image of the Black Widow we’ve been able to secure. We now know what she looks like.”

Clint met his eyes for a second, before looking eagerly back at the photo. It was a little grainy, but the quality was decent enough. Several people were frozen on the page, a moment on a street in some city with brick storefronts and small European cars. At the center of the page, a woman hurried along the sidewalk, her red hair tied up in a knot and her trench coat cinched tight around her slender waist. She was pretty and she looked terrified of something. It wasn’t evident on her face; her face was blank, almost bored. He could see the fear in the way she clutched at the strap of her bag, knuckles white, the muscles of her forearm taut with tension.

He grabbed the file from the table, scanning it. He’d read parts of it before, on a mission when they thought they’d found her, but his clearance level had been lower then and he hadn’t been able to access a lot of the information. Still, he’d gotten a decent idea of how the woman worked, how she moved and reacted and played her game. And something in that woman’s face, something in her body language was all wrong.

He was halfway through her file – the full version – noting the references to the Red Room and genetic experimentation and behavior modification and memory modification, when Coulson cleared his throat loudly.

“Hang on,” Clint said, annoyed. “This is fishy.”

They let him read, blessedly silent, and he was surprised to find himself feeling sorry for this woman, not that he would ever admit that. He’d just finished the report on her most recent job (the assassination of a drug lord at his own birthday party, which, serious points for style) when something hit him.

He looked back at the image in the photo, noting her line of sight, the way her eyes were fixed on something. “What is she looking at?” He asked no one, drawing an invisible line on the photo to the window of what looked like a bookstore. And there it was. Plain as day.

“Holy shit!” Clint said, heartbeat doubling in surprise, humorless laugh bubbling up out of his throat.

“Barton, you had better get to explaining.”

“She is not the Black Widow,” Clint said, his finger sliding to hover over the image of a woman standing inside the bookstore. “She is.”

He explained his reasoning, pointed out how she liked to use a double, how she was never, ever caught off guard and if she was, she never, ever showed it. He pointed out how she always fit in, always dressed, acted, talked like a local and this woman was wearing a designer coat and her bag probably cost more that the combined income of the people walking down the street with her. He did not point out that he already knew the woman in the bookstore.

***

It took them three months to catch back up to her and Clint spent those three months living and breathing her file. He compared all of this new information against the memory of the girl he knew as Nina, considered the way she spoke and the way she moved, tried to recall all of the details from the day she showed up, looking for a job, demonstrating a surprising acrobatic ability. He could not seem to reconcile Nina with the Widow.

She must have killed Carson, he realized at some point, though he couldn’t imagine who wanted the old man dead quite that badly. He doesn’t particularly care.

At the bottom of a box he almost never looked through, he found the one picture he had of her. She was smiling, her hand held above her eyes to shield against the bright Midwestern sun. They’d been swimming in a river that barely deserved the name and drinking pilfered whisky straight from the bottle. They were already sleeping together by the time that photo had been taken, sneaking off to the woods or the bars or anywhere they could be alone and free.

He probably should have been angry that she wasn’t actually that person, but then his mind would call back to that fateful Tuesday, to a rainy road, her lips against his, a stolen bow tucked into a duffel bag at his feet. 

“Go on, then. Go be whatever you’re going to be.”

He should have been angry, but he just wasn’t. Whoever Nina had been, however much of her had been real or fake or somewhere in between, she did right by him and he owed her at least that much in return.

***

She knew he was there. He could see it in the way she walked, could see it in the way her eyes slid over to where he was holed up despite the fact that there was no way she could actually see him. He would have been lying if he said he wasn’t incredibly excited. Coulson and Fury had cooked up a plan, a good plan, but there was no way in hell he was going through with it.

His earpiece crackled and Coulson’s voice filtered through. “Are you admiring the view, Barton, or are you going to take the shot?”

“I can’t do both?”

Apparently, Coulson did not feel that deserved an answer because the line fell silent and Clint went back to watching her walk the length of the canal. She looked the same, still beautiful and deceptively tiny. Her hair was red now, where it had been blond when he’d known her as Nina the orphaned acrobat. It wasn’t that far from the truth, really.

With quick and precise movements, Clint packed his gear and sprinted down the stairs. The rooftop was perfect, this job was perfect, he almost felt bad for wasting such an excellent set up.

He cut through an alley and slipped into the hotel through a service door at the back. The maid he’d flirted with earlier smiled at him and handed him the key card he’d requested. 

“Where the hell are you?” Coulson said and Clint smiled at the way he almost sounded worried. 

“Getting a closer look. Trust me on this one.”

“God damn it, Barton,” was all Coulson got out before Clint took the earpiece out and let it hang from his collar.

He slipped into her room only a moment before she did and to no one’s surprise, she already had her gun drawn when she stepped inside.

“You’re not the only one who can flirt with the maid, you know,” she said, closing the door silently.

“I think she likes me better.”

She took a moment to look at him, her expression never changing, but her eyes flicking from one place to another – his earpiece, his bow, his suit, the logo on his shoulder. Finally, after a long moment, she spoke,

“Clint,” she said and it was nearly friendly, nearly soft.

“Widow.”

She inclined her head in something between an affirmation and a greeting and the edges of her lips turned up slightly. “So,” she said. “This is what you became.”

“Turns out,” he said, lowering his bow. “There wasn’t a huge need for archers out there in the civilian world.”

“What’re you doing?” She asked, eyeing his lowered bow.

“What’s your name? Really?”

Her gun never left him as he set the bow on the bed, but she looked a little wary, a little suspicious.

“Clint,” she said, but this time it wasn’t soft. “You’ve made a very serious reputation for yourself. I am not lowering this gun.”

He held up his hand, palms out. “I didn’t ask you to. It would be really great if you didn’t shoot me though. I really hate getting shot.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you won’t shoot me?”

“If I wanted to shoot you, I would have done it already. And don’t give me that crap, you were practically handing me the shot.”

She snorted, as though it was ridiculous he should say that, but her bravado didn’t quite ring true.

“What’s your name? I can’t call you Nina and I don’t want to call you Widow, so help a guy out.”

“Natasha.”

“I like it,” he said, genuine, honest, because he did like it. But mostly, he was really just happy neither one of them was dead and they were sort of getting somewhere with this, so maybe neither one of them would be dead at all. “Would you call me a sap if I said it was good to see you?”

“Yes.”

He pretended to mull it over. “I’ll risk it. It’s good to see you.”

Her only reply was narrowed eyes.

“Okay, look, I dropped my tracker and I went radio silent. I gave my handler false information on my recon and I’m very probably getting fired if I make it out of here, but it won’t take them forever to figure out where we are. We have maybe an hour, so just put the gun somewhere a little less pointed at me and I’ll tell you why I’m here, because it isn’t to kill you.”

She glared and dropped the level of the gun so it lined up with his crotch.

He raised his eyebrows. “Seem to recall you didn’t hate that particular part my anatomy.”

“Do all men do that? Have to remind women that they’ve had sex? It’s really annoying.”

“It’s genetic, I think.”

She lowered her gun, paused, and then holstered it, but she made no move to come away from the door. “You have five minutes.”

“Come in with me,” he said, because, well, ripping off band-aids was always his preferred method and, really, he sucked at subtle when it didn’t have to do with lurking in dark places. When she started to protest, he cut her off. “Just hear me out. I came here prepared to kill you, but only if you gave me no other option. And then there you were, letting me have the shot, practically flirting with me, begging me to take it. Why, Natasha? Why would you do that? Because you want out.”

“Is that right?” She raised an eyebrow and settled her hands on her hips. 

“And some sappy part of you was willing to let me be the one to do it.”

She laughed, a deep throaty laugh. “And why in the world would I let some carney I met on a throw away job take me out?”

Clint shrugged. “I dunno, Natasha. Why would you remember the exact conversation we had the last time we saw each other?”

She didn’t answer, but he hadn’t really been expecting her to. Nothing on her face or in her demeanor gave him any hint as to what she was thinking, as to what she wanted, so he waited. He watched her as she stood eerily still, expecting him to do something, to try and catch her off guard or trick her. But he wasn’t going to, he didn’t want to, he just wanted to give her an out that wasn’t death, if that’s what she wanted.

Their time ticked away and she didn’t seem to be budging either way. He had one last option and after that it was death by the Black Widow or death by Fury. Cautiously, with one hand out in surrender, he reached into his pocket and tugged out the photo he’d kept in the box in his room, the edges a little bent and worn from living in his pocket for the last three months, and crossed the room to hand it to her.

“I don’t believe everything about that girl was a lie.”

***

Their first op together, after he’d been put on probation and sent to Siberia for a month with some idiot who wasn’t Coulson and kept acting like he had some kind of right to make Clint’s life hell, was in Sanaa. It was an easy job, a protection detail, of all ridiculous things, but it went well and they worked well together and it wasn’t long before Fury was letting them take more involved jobs.

She wasn’t given much by way of security clearance, to no one’s surprise, and if she minded, she didn’t say. 

Things were awkward when they were on the carrier. She wasn’t good with people, generally, and she spent her time divided between training, her bunk or the mess. Clint couldn’t really blame her, she had been enemy number one for a long time and no one was lining up to be her friend, so he stuck pretty close. It wasn’t hard, given that he spent much of his own time doing the same three things she did.

She didn’t dodge him, which he took as a good sign, and when he decided to set up a regular sparring session with her, she smiled and then proceeded to kick his ass.

“This is weird,” he had said. “I can’t decide if I’m horrified or turned on.”

“You’re an idiot,” she replied, jabbing him in the stomach as she walked past his crumpled form. “Come on, you can teach me to play that ridiculous zombie game of yours so you can feel like you beat me at something.”

And that was it; she had crossed some line or won some internal battle or whatever, because after that she was a different creature entirely. She still didn’t make many friends, though Garcia warmed to her and Coulson repeatedly reminded Clint that he liked Natasha much better. Other agents stopped refusing ops that she was on, though Clint was still her partner, because, as Fury had so succinctly explained, if he was going to bring home deadly stray pets, he was going to be responsible for them.

She warmed to communal life slowly, but she did warm to it. It was hard, she would say from time to time, because the only other people she had ever lived with were dead and they had been somehow her sisters and her enemies and she wasn’t completely sure how to view these people that she shared quarters with now. 

She talked sometimes of the little she remembered from the Red Room, she talked of the emptiness in her memory where she knew things should go, but no matter how hard she tried, she never could get them back. Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly open, she would tell him of the people she sacrificed to destroy the Red Room and of the regrets she learned to live with. Other times, she would tell him stories about the lost moments, after she was working on her own, when she would travel to beautiful places and see snippets of the world, of the people in it, and remember that some of it was pure, some of it was innocent.

By her one-year mark, she seemed content with whatever peace she had made with this life, she seemed almost settled.

And she was kicking everyone’s asses at Left 4 Dead.

***

On Natasha’s three-year anniversary with S.H.I.E.L.D., Fury bumped her clearance level to three and sent them to Arkansas.

“Arkansas?” Clint asked, his tone somewhere between indignant and confused. Natasha said nothing because she was clearly the brains of their operation.

“Do you have a problem with that, Agent Barton?”

“Probably,” he answered, because while he may have done probationary shit hole time in Siberia, he also single handedly flipped the Black Widow and as partners they held the distinction of being the team with the most successful missions to their names. So, yeah, he was still going to be just as difficult as he wanted to be.

Coulson chimed in before either Clint or Fury could say anything further. “There’s a compound here,” he handed them a map and a thick file folder, at which Clint groaned. “It’s isolated and well protected. Local authorities have never been able to get within three miles of the place. Until today, they were content to just leave them alone, but at 0700 local time, a surface to air missile was fired from this compound and shot down a small private jet. The jet crash landed only a few miles from the compound perimeter. The jet was carrying a man by the name of Kevin Maru. He’s a scientist with branch of the government that you don’t need to know or care about. We’ve found the wreckage, but no bodies.”

“What do they want with him?” Natasha asked, thumbing through the file.

“We don’t think they want anything with him, specifically.” Fury had started pacing, but paused to look down on them. “We don’t think they know who they have.”

“Weird,” Clint mused aloud. 

“Your job will be to infiltrate the compound, get Maru and the pilot if they’re alive, destroy whatever weapons you find, and bring back intel on whether this was a fluke or if they knew exactly who they were shooting at.”

“Piece of cake,” Clint said, rubbing his hands together excitedly.

So, of course, it was not at all a piece of cake and the whole op went to shit nearly as soon as they got there.

“Is that a moat? They have a fucking moat?” Clint glared down at the wide swath of water that snaked around what looked like a series of trailers and shanties.

“So it would seem,” Natasha said, her tone dry.

“If there are alligators, you get to wrestle them.”

They dropped in by parachute four miles to the east, in a small clearing, and stashed the supplies they didn’t need at the edge of a rocky dry riverbed. The terrain sucked, all mountains and thick forests and Clint was immediately annoyed. He hated contending with branches and leaves and random bits of nature for a clear line of sight.

“Oh, hey,” Clint said, as they tromped through the underbrush, mildly succeeding at not being obvious. “Congrats on your new clearance level.”

She said nothing, but managed a small grin in his direction. 

“You know what this means? You get to read your own file now. Well, parts of it.”

She stopped walking unexpectedly, turning to face him, an odd sort of thoughtful look on her face and he was reminded strongly of Nina. Without warning, she leaned in and placed a small, quick kiss to his cheek. “Thank you,” she said and he didn’t need to ask what for, he already knew.

They reached the compound at sunset, which was about an hour after they had planned, on account of the fucking moat, and quickly made their way to what they suspected was storage. Intel was minimal so this was a guess-and-hope-for-the-best sort of mission, which was Clint’s least favorite sort of mission.

“Okay, they’ve got some kind of jamming system.” Coulson’s voice was tense in Clint’s ear. “Your trackers are down, do you copy radio trans –“

Natasha caught his eye and shook her head. She’d lost her comms too. 

“Okay, we do this old school. Let’s start here,” he pointed to a wide, squat building that might have once been a very large chicken coop. The walls were a patchwork of plywood and sheet metal and what looked like old car hoods. “You get inside and I’ll be up there.” Up there was a tall oak tree that stood like a sentinel at the center of the compound. 

“Clint,” Natasha started, but he shrugged, silently telling her that he already knew what she was going to say and it wasn’t going to change anything.

“It’s the only good spot.” He said.

“Don’t get shot. I know how you hate that,” she said, smiling briefly, before taking off toward her destination.

The tree was already outfitted as a look out, which they both knew would be the case. There were pieces of wood and metal nailed into the trunk to make up a crude sort of ladder and Clint had no trouble climbing them. Above him he could see what amounted to a tree house if tree houses came standard with rifles and steel plating. Someone was pacing the length of the small one-room perch, his or her footsteps evenly placed and heavy. Four steps and turn, four steps and turn – Clint listened for any change or variation to the guard’s pattern, but there was none and it took only a moment for Clint to slip through the opening in the floor and catch the man unaware. 

Contrary to popular belief, Clint wasn’t exactly the type to kill unnecessarily. It was almost like cheating; of course you win if you kill every last person in front of you regardless of their guilt or involvement. This time, however, he couldn’t risk leaving the man alive. Not to mention, he would have put a bullet in Clint’s forehead if he’d had the chance. 

The space was too small to really pull off a clean shot with his bow, so Clint resorted to a clean break of the neck and scooted the body to the corner.

There was a small glassless window on each wall of the lookout and a rack of four rifles hanging near the entrance. Several boxes of ammo were situated under the windows. They were pretty serious about guarding this place and Clint groaned inwardly. 

To the west, he had a good view of the building Nat had started with. Beyond it, sat a grouping of trailers and a much nicer building he would bet dollars to doughnuts was the armory. 

Nat darted across the open space quickly, sparing a small glance in his direction. He whistled one long note and she held up a hand in reply.

She worked her way around the trailers and buildings, hitting jackpot in one of the crustier trailers. Maru was alive, but Clint could tell he was pretty beat up when they emerged from the doorway and she was practically carrying him. 

She looked up at his perch, caught his eye even though there was no way she could have seen inside the darkened box, and shook her head. He had an arrow knocked before she’d even looked away. A man, tall and overly thin, stepped into the courtyard behind Natasha and Maru. He had an arrow in his eye before he even lifted his gun.

Without bothering to think about it, Clint whistled again, this time a series of short notes and Natasha switched direction immediately, heading straight for their exit point. If that man had raised any alarms, which were sort of pathetically slow if he had, the mission was scrapped and they needed to just make a run for it.

No one else appeared for several minutes and Clint watched as Nat made it past the tree line and out of the compound proper with Maru. Which, of course, was when everyone and their fucking uncle’s cousin’s aunt came barreling out into the open areas. 

A grizzled man who looked more grizzle than man, took up a place in the center and the crowd stopped chattering, stopped moving entirely. Next to him, stood a woman who looked rode extra hard and put away extra wet. 

“My friends,” Grizzly Adams said. “We have been invaded! The government has come here to take your freedom! They have sent assassins and evil, immoral men to destroy this life we have carved, that we have built and bled for!”

This was about when Clint stopped listening, because his comm. flickered back to life and Nat’s voice was clear in his ear.

“What’ve you got?” She asked, breath coming rapidly. She was clearly running, which meant she had offloaded Maru.

“This guy is Charles Mansoning all over the place. We’re about to be in some very serious shit.”

“Do they know you’re there?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, now would be a good time to learn to keep your mouth shut.”

Clint grinned. “Did you just make a funny? Aww, it’s like baby’s first word.”

“Both of you shut the hell up.”

“Oh, hi boss, “ Clint said, relieved to hear Coulson’s voice again.

Something exploded and it took Clint a second to realize that it was him. A fireball erupted around him and he felt the floor shift, sending him into an ungraceful sprawl. Several branches cracked and groaned, but he stayed in the tree. At least for now. Flames shot through the windows and smoke filled his nose and mouth.

“Hawkeye, report.”

“Still here. Barely.”

“I’m at the eastern edge of the tree line,” Nat said. “Near the…what the hell is this? An outhouse? Jesus.”

Dragging himself to the other side of the room, Clint scanned the area and found her, pressed against what did indeed look like an outhouse, pistols drawn.

“Backup?” Clint asked and followed it up with a few creative swears when the answer was ten minutes. “That isn’t really gonna work for me.”

“You have incoming,” Nat said. “You have to get out of there.”

“Suggestions?” He glanced back at the hoard, who were now working quickly to further arm themselves. He spared a half a thought of self-congratulations when he saw that they were pulling weapons from the building he thought was the armory. He changed his mind when they dragged a rocket launcher out and started aiming it.

“Jump?” Nat said and he could tell she was on the move again. “I’m going to see if I can take out that rocket.”

She didn’t get there in time and Clint had just enough time to loose one arrow before he was forced to do exactly as she suggested. It was at least a twenty-foot drop and he landed fine, careful to absorb the shock correctly and roll out of it. It was the falling wreckage that was the problem. Something heavy landed on his back and all he could do was roll into a ball and hope nothing crushed him.

“Hawkeye is down,” Nat was saying, her breath fast but her tone solid. “Unknown status. I’m going to minimize the – “ But she didn’t get to finish her sentence because his arrow had found it’s target and exploded, which caused another and another and another as the armory turned into a fireworks show.

Clint wasn’t sure exactly what happened after that. He remembered her dragging something off of him, talking to him with her lips all pursed in that way she had when she was mad and he maybe thought he remembered running frantically through the woods and asking when they’d gotten to Narnia.

He hated concussions.

The next clear thought he has was waking up in medical, a beeping monitor hooked to his finger and an angry redhead staring at him from the doorway.

“Hi,” he said, groggy, voice rough from sleep.

Natasha didn’t say anything, just stood there, her arms crossed and face blank.

“That’s your angry expressionless face, isn’t it?”

She was about to answer when a nurse showed up to check him over and kick him out, which she did with impressive efficiency. Nat walked back to his quarters with him, still stoically silent and he almost started a fight just to change the weird, tense-but-thoughtful climate they had going. He didn’t, because obviously, but it was a close thing.

When they reached his room, she closed the door behind her, marched up to him and planted a solid right hook to his jaw. He stumbled, caught off guard, and then suddenly she was there holding him up. Except, not... she was hugging him. She had her arms wrapped around his neck and her face pressed against his shoulder and it was scaring the shit out of him.

“Nat, I...”

“Shut up, Barton.”

Somehow, he managed not to say anything else, managed to just let her hug him. After a moment, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to stab, shoot, impale, scalp or otherwise hurt him, Clint hugged her back.

***

Budapest sucked balls. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

***

Tony Stark went missing while Clint and Natasha were in Bruges, surrounded by wanna-be Hydra agents with weird ray guns that only worked about one-tenth of the time. They were calling themselves Hades and Clint suspected that was the only other Greek word they knew, because what a stupid name.

At any rate, they were surrounded, which was right where they were supposed to be, on track to make it another perfect op, when the doors fell apart and about two hundred S.H.I.E.L.D. agents barged into the warehouse. 

Clint threw up his arms, annoyed. “I think our cover’s blown.”

Coulson showed up about ten minutes later and he looked almost appropriately apologetic. He held up a hand just as Clint opened his mouth, cutting him off. “No, this doesn’t count against your score card, which we absolutely do not keep, because that would be poor people management and motivation.”

Natasha suppressed a smile and looked at Clint. “Towing the company line,” she said.

“You have been spending way too much time with Barton,” Coulson grumbled, motioning for them to follow him out of the warehouse. They did so and ended up speeding through the city in a standard issue black SUV. Just once, Clint wished it was a Mini Cooper. Or an Aston Martin.

“Tony Stark was ambushed and kidnapped. We suspect The Ten Rings.”

Nat shifted next to him and Clint nearly asked what she was thinking, but decided to save that for when they were alone and she could speak freely. He wondered when they started keeping things from Coulson and frowned.

They were given the story, they were sent to Afghanistan and they were so, so bored. She told him later that she had some history with The Ten Rings, some violent and bloody history and it wasn’t always Natasha making it violent and bloody.

It was the type of story that she told him at unexpected times, the type of story that he could tell weighed on her heavier than she would ever admit. Natasha didn’t like failing and she didn’t like weakness and she hated being taken advantage of, so it all made sense; he understood her trepidation, her reluctance to tell people of her missteps and losses. Still, he always felt a little... he wasn’t even sure what it was. He was just glad she could tell him, at least.

They were on stand-by for three months, positioned nearby, rotting in the desert, ready to take down the group if they got any indication that Stark is there or even alive. They got no go-ahead, they got no gear-up, they got nothing at all. Turns out Stark was pretty good at saving himself.

“So,” Clint said, when they had finally (FINALLY!) returned to the carrier and he had his XBox and Coulson was lurking behind him in the rec room. “Rhodes found his bestie. Good thing you had your hardest hitters wasting away, doing nothing.”

“Rhodes found him in a stroke of luck.” 

“Personally, I’m still shocked he’s alive.”

“We all are,” Nat said, having entered the room with a bag of some kind of disgusting organic pretend food. She sat next to him and picked up her controller. “Okay, Barton, I’m ready to kill more zombies than you.”

He scoffed. “Maybe digital zombies. I would outlive you by years in the actual zombie apocalypse.”

Natasha turned to glare, inching forward in subconscious threat. “Like hell. Bullets fire faster than arrows.”

“I have better aim. Head shots only, Tasha.”

“Okay,” Coulson said, still loitering. “You’ll both be awesome zombie killers. Romanoff, you’ve got an assignment. Ship out tomorrow.”

“Ooh,” Clint crooned, twisting around to see Coulson step forward and hand her a folder. “Where are we going?”

“Not you. Just Natasha.”

There was a long awkward silence while they all looked at each other. It wasn’t that no one wanted her on a solo mission, it was just that she’d never gone on one and this was a big milestone. It was a huge step forward for her and Clint was proud. And so, so annoyed.

“Congrats,” Clint said, doing his very best to sound genuine. 

“Fury wants to see you at 0700, Agent. He’s running this op. You’ll be reporting to him. I will be present in an assisting capacity, but this is his op.”

“Okay,” Nat said, as she flipped through the file. “See you then.” It wasn’t so much a friendly goodbye as it was a get lost and Clint was grateful.

“Are you pouting?” She asked him, bumping his shoulder with her own. “It’s a surprisingly good look for you.”

“No. Yes. I can’t believe I’m getting left behind.” He wasn’t petulant... he wasn’t, but he was more than reasonably annoyed at being left behind. And maybe he was a little worried. Nat was a really good agent, maybe the best, but he was her partner, they were a double act, you didn’t get one without the other. Except apparently you did.

She stood up, ruffled his hair. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m going to babysit-slash-probably-seduce Tony Stark, which might be the most annoying job ever.”

Alone, Clint stared at the paused game without seeing it. “I could seduce Stark,” he told the empty room.

“I don’t doubt that,” someone said from the hallway and when Clint turned to look, he swore he saw the cuff of a long leather jacket whip past the doorway.

He didn’t have to pout long, however, because true to form, Tony Stark lost his shit and they brought Clint in to sit around on top of things in case he was needed to shoot anyone. 

And then he was pouting again, because two days into that mission, he was sitting on a crane, watching Nat butter Stark up in, oh Jesus, animal print.

He opted not to dissect that feeling and was actually relieved when Coulson called him away to another job. Of course, he changed his mind when he got to New Mexico and saw that it involved a hammer.

***

“Sir?”

Coulson looked up, face blank. “Agent?”

“Why are we obsessing over a weird hammer?”

“Because it’s weird.”

“Copy, sir.”

***

Clint hated the god damn desert. He did not, however, hate hanging with Coulson and watching some huge monster of a man beat the shit out of another monster of a man. It was a damn good fight, really, and he was definitely rooting for the underdog. Later, after miles and years and lifetimes, he would come to understand that he hadn’t been rooting for the underdog at all. But by then, he would still be rooting for Thor, so whatever.

***

And then there are scars in his memory; giant gaping wounds of space and time and he found himself sitting next to her, pressed together shoulder to thigh. He looked at her, waited while she struggled with words that she could never say and without any of the words he wanted to say himself, because he didn’t quite realize, never stopped to let it seep in, that he was probably stupidly in love with her.

Her eyes went soft in a way he hadn’t seen since maybe ever and he sucked in a breath because he came so close to killing her, came so close to killing himself.

But they were nothing if not self-sabotaging, so even as he watched her hinge on revelation, watched her consider jumping off a cliff that he never even noticed they’d walked up to, they stop and run off to save the damn world.

***

After, when they’d managed to hole up in one of Stark’s many, many guest rooms (“Jesus, Nat, is this, like, the Liberace room or something?” “He heard you were in the circus.”), Clint slept for what might have been days. He remembered waking up to her warm presence next to him, curled in on herself, he remembered waking again later to her absence and even later still to her arm draped across his chest.

He woke for real, finally rested, finally clear-headed, to a dark room and her elbow in his ribs and a leg thrown over his thigh, and he thought: _Well, fuck it._

Slowly, carefully, because spooking her was a very bad idea, Clint shifted, brought a hand up to to her jaw and slid a knee between her thighs. She moved beside him, suddenly awake, suddenly alert. Nat didn’t pull away or lean in, but he could feel her heartbeat speed up and her hand twitch against his chest. She was facing him, red hair tangled across the pillow, her legs twined with his and when she opened her eyes she didn’t look away.

It didn’t take much to close the distance between them and kiss her. She responded immediately and the small part of him that still thought she might hit him, relaxed. He managed, despite the fact that his body was one giant bruise, to get an elbow underneath himself and slid up, shifting her to her back. She her leg higher on his hip, and oh God, he wanted nothing more than to press her into the mattress and watch her dissolve.

She tugged his bottom lip between her teeth and he absolutely did not whimper. But then her hands found the hem of his shirt and when she tugged it over his head, sliding her palm across his chest, he totally whimpered. Her shirt followed a half a second later and he bit his lip in an effort not to say something truly embarrassing. She was braless and everything else-less, having apparently come to bed in just an old t-shirt.

“Tasha,” he said, almost a question, almost a prayer. “Did you sleep in bed with me in just this?”

“Mmhmm.” She ran a hand up his spine and sucked at his pulse point. She spread her legs wider, letting him settle between her thighs, her bare feet cold against the backs of his legs and she said his name and he groaned against her neck, leaving wet kisses along her collarbone.

“I’m sorry,” he said, her breath hitching and her hips lifting, as he inched down her body, stopping it kiss between her breasts.

“For what?”

“For being a fucking idiot,” he said and dipped his head further, kissing just above her pelvic bone, flattening a hand against the inside of her thigh, and licking a path to her center.

“You’re forgiven.”

She writhed against him as he slid one and then two fingers inside her, tongue teasing at her clit, fingers rubbing frantic inside her. One hand found her hip bone, the rough pad of his thumb rubbing a line from there to her sternum, drifting over one and then the other nipple. 

“Clint,” she grunted, her thighs tightening around him and he pumped his fingers faster, raked his tongue and his teeth across her clit and smiled against her hot skin as she jerked and spasmed and groaned in orgasm.

Laying still, her chest rising and falling rapidly, he followed his earlier path back up her body, kissing a line from thigh to jaw.

“Jesus,” she said a moment later.

“My friends just call me Clint.”

“Ass.”

There was a lazy, happy grin on her face and Clint couldn’t help smiling in return and kissing her equally as lazily and happily. She wove her arms around his neck, tangling her fingers in his hair and arched her back, lifting her hips, grinding against his erection. Freeing a hand from his hair, she found the band of his boxers and the next thing he knew, he was sucking in a breath, his forehead buried against her shoulder, her hand wrapped around his cock.

“Nat... I can’t...you...”

The boxers were gone in a quick movement that was only sort of awkward, and then he was sliding inside her and oh holy shit.

Fuck. She was very still beneath him, her pulse point fluttering quickly and her breathing deep. Her fingers were pressed against his shoulder blades and he could feel her blunt nails drag against his skin. And then she moved and that was it, he was lost.

Clint rocked forward, pressing her into the mattress, lips on her throat, her face, her breasts, her earlobes, anywhere and everywhere because he needed some sort of distraction from the way she was so hot and wet and the way she hooked her ankles at his back, tugging him deeper inside her. She clenched around him suddenly, gasping and throwing her head back, her whole body locking around him as she came. Erratically, he pumped his hips, driving into her, losing any rhythm he had until he too was pitching himself against her, spent.

They were still for a long moment, cheek to cheek, heavy breaths mingling. He half expected her to run, to make some excuse and disappear, because if there was one thing Natasha didn’t do, it was the more tender things on the spectrum of human emotions. But she didn’t, she sighed and languidly ran a finger along his spine to his arm to his jaw. 

“Mmm, Clint. You have to move or I’ll suffocate.”

He managed to shift sideways, but his reply was mostly an unintelligible mumble.

They awoke some hours later, tangled in some sort of knot of legs and arms and she smiled at him a little shyly, which gave him goosebumps that he failed entirely to hide.

“Hey, Tasha.”

“Yeah?”

“Ow.”

“What?”

“You’re on my arm.”

“So?”

“Well, someone bit me.”

Her laugh was loud and long and genuine and when she rolled over, she rolled up to straddle his hips, planting her palms flat on his chest.

“You deserved it, but next time I bite you, it’ll be much more fun.”

 

_END_  


**Author's Note:**

> This is decidedly not my first fanfic, but it is my first Avengers or Marvel fic, so concrit is totally welcome. A million thanks to my heterolifemate isis_uf who gave this a look-see and suggested the title and part of the summary. All mistakes are my own and I appreciate all feedback. Thanks!


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